Crazy GOP partying like it’s 1989

David Frum has a meaty, beaty, big and bouncy essay about why the Republican Party went nutso. I’m not with Frum on social issues, but there’s a lot in this thing I agree with. Excerpts:

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

More:

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

And:

It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

Read the whole thing. If you comment on this, please spare us the ad hominem attacks on Frum. We know, we know. Address his arguments and claims, please.

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29 Responses to Crazy GOP partying like it’s 1989

i don’t think Frum’s a RINO, but i wish he’d at least fess up that it was _his_ #1 pet issue — the Iraq War and the general Bush democratization ideology — that was a big part of the swing in the Democrats’ favor, especially in ’06. that’s fine if he still thinks it was the right thing to do, but it’s a little irritating reading him constantly complain about how it’s everyone else who has to jettison their “extreme” views for purely political reasons.

that’s another thing, other than on national security, the guy does not appear to have any strongly conservative principles, or at least none that he won’t sell out if it means more votes. check out his recent post on the pro-life plank for instance — he’s never been pro-life, so not the best example, but at the same time on the actual issue itself, he just wrings his hands and says it’s “complicated,” and the entire rest of his argument is about it not being a politically beneficial issue. that may be true but i preferred the days where he actually offered his own personal take on issues rather than playing wannabe nu-GOP operative.

The problem is that modern Republican Party relies heavily on libertarian dogma for its energy and intellectual coherence. Since libertarianism has a negative view of government, the Republican Party’s response to the various problems of the country is mired in the same basic response: cut taxes and reduce government. If all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. Add to this the normal level of corruption infecting the political class and the recipe for the modern Republican Party is in place.

Of course, people like Frum helped bring this on by their deliberate efforts to marginalize social conservatives and traditionalist conservatives in the GOP. The more inventive approaches to crime, inflation and the Cold War mentioned by Frum were largely influenced by the cross-party social conservatism/law & order ideas that were found in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. In the absence of those conservative voices, the energy in the party has been provided by libertarians. Not good, but completely predictable.

Rod, I apologize in advance but it is hard to critique a work of Frum’s without, at the very, very least, some mild form of irritation. I believe the main reason for this is his ability to take specific arguments, critiques and ideas made by writers of publications and journals and blogs he would generally regard with disdain or disgust and pass them off as his own and then, at the very same time, attack such people viciously for what he doesn’t agree with them upon and then try to “banish” them, or marginalize them, from the general debate on the basis of these disagreements.

On its own merits the piece is a good one (I’ve always complemented Frum’s intelligence and writing ability). The problem is nothing he is saying hasn’t been said long before he converted from true believer to dissident in the pages of The American Conservative by writers like Austin Bramwell (“provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel)); by Pat Buchanan and the writers at VDARE.com (“White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008.”); by John Derbyshire (“As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much.”) and even myself (“A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising). a.k.a Conservative INC.

But of course we are all in the fever swamps Frum and his friends at Fox and AEI and the Weekly Standard and the National Review banished us to in the last decade, except for when Frum stops by and collects the pretty butterflies he finds there for his collection. If you talk to people who work and write for TRI and Chronicles for example, his methods are what drive them to absolutely loathe the man because he operated in the same fashion when writing Dead Right. He soaked up ideas they had in the late 1980s and early 1990s about conservatism and the country as whole, using what he liked and then attacked them in a nasty, mean-spirited way for he didn’t like about them.

If Frum wrote or said he was sorry for the past things he’s said and done and was willing to work with fellow dissidents and others he’s trashed because we all happen to share similar views of how rotten things are within the GOP and with the conservative establishment, then in the spirit of Christian charity and forgiveness (I am, of course, speaking only for myself) I would welcome collaboration given his talents and experience on the inside. Yet there is nothing in this piece which indicates he is ready or really wants to do this.

Frum says “the Bush years haunt me.” Yet what haunts him exactly? What part of the “mess” does he take responsibility for? He does not say. Was it No Child Left Behind? Medicare Part D? unlimited immigration? Iraq? Afghanistan? Notice that nowhere in Frum’s piece are the wars even mentioned, only as a euphemism for Vietnam. Is the democratic utopianism he decried in Dead Right an embarrassment to him now after it was put into full force by the Administration’s fellow neocons? Much of what caused Republican defeats in 2006 and ’08, at least for most voters, were these wars and how their mismanagement helped in no small measure to wreck the economy. True, he does not defend the Bush II record but he does not repudiate it either.

This leads one to wonder what he proposes the GOP should stand for if not its current rotten, knee-jerk orthodoxy? Is “government can borrow for ten years at two percent” his solution? The government has been doing exactly that for a long, long time and yet the debts incurred from such borrowing to pay for the wars and the entitlement programs the Bush II Administration he worked for supported are coming due. How would more borrowing help the situation? If the potential candidate he was secretly writing speeches for ultimately decided not to run for President, does anyone think it’s coincidence? Obviously nothing Frum wrote changed this person’s mind or made him more willing to undertake a run for the White House.

Actually, in my opinion, I think Frum is once again writing another screed against his old enemies, the “ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers.” He wisely does not name names this time around but I think we probably know who he is referring to. It would not surprise me when he saw Ron Paul rise in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire he leaped from the couch to his desk and his computer to write this New Yorker piece saying to himself “My God! They’re actually supporting Ron Paul! I’ve got to stop them!”. And yet what is Ron Paul trying to do but to break the very political stalemate in our country by creating a new, realigning political coalition which would include a broad base of voters of all backgrounds,ethnic groups, races, religions, opinions and persuasions united on a few simple ideas? Why is this not a potential future for the GOP as compared to what Frum is not clearly offering as an alternative to what is there now? How is being “Obama light” or “Obama, only less so” (or better yet, “Me too!”) going to attract voters who do not like the man or convince his supporters to abandon him to someone like Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman, Frum’s presumed favored candidates?

Finally, as much as this article makes several good points, it will not reach nor influence its potential audience. Tomorrow morning this piece will be linked to by at least a dozen liberal blogs, all celebrating Frum as the “conservative voice of reason.” Frum will be seen as someone who can be worked with or discuss ideas with, which is exactly the way he wants to be seen. If this is familiar to those who have followed Frum’s career closely is because it’s follows a pattern according to Wikipedia:

As a columnist for the Yale Daily News in the early ’80s, Frum joined his liberal editors in a campaign to urge the university to seize control of the Yale Literary Magazine, at the time owned by a 25-year-old alumnus named Andrei Navrozov. According to the New York Times, Navrozov had acquired “the financially troubled magazine” in 1978 and “turned the modest undergraduate journal into a handsome journal with a national circulation.” Frum and his allies said they simply wanted the Lit returned to the undergraduates. But Navrozov detected a political subtext to their efforts, the existence of which the Times, in its coverage of the Lit controversy in 1981, confirmed. “Privately, these same people talk about Mr. Navrozov’s politics,” the newspaper reported, “his ‘raucous, antiliberal, new cold war’ politics.” . . .A Yale near-contemporary, John Zmirak recalls, “Frum had made himself well-known among the amazingly intolerant Leftist students of early 1980s Yale by loudly espousing Reaganite foreign and budgetary policy.” That notwithstanding, “there was a sense” that attacking the Lit “was a good career move,” an unnamed ally of Navrozov’s told Toronto Life in 2001, “a sense—and a resentment—that [Frum] was trying to establish himself as the acceptable conservative voice on campus—not with other conservatives, but with the powers that be.”

Of course, if you don’t know, Navrozov is Chronicles European Editor. As I said, I speak only for myself when it comes to welcoming Frum. Others will not be so charitable and I don’t blame them one iota. It’s too bad his reach is limited because no conservative trusts him, but it is a responsibility which he alone must bare. Whether it “haunts” him or not only he can say but one can only conclude – by this piece and others he has written recently – until proven otherwise, it doesn’t.

What Frum and everyone else who calls himself a movement conservative never seem to grasp (though buckle, fanously, finally admitted as much in his final years) is that their movement was strictly a function of the Cold War. Since 1991 every last man-jack among them has been the electoral answer to Wile E. Coyote, happily living in the suspended mid-air animation of blissful ignorance a mile above the canyon to the extent they choose never to look down. And when Frum or anyone else (Camille Paglia among Democrats) use the locution “my party”, it is to cringe over.

There are manu interesting questions. “Whither conservatism?” is not among them.

It’s difficult to disentangle any critique of the piece from a critique of Frum himself. I agree with most of what he’s saying, but he’s the wrong evangelist for this gospel and so he’s totally unable to tell the story honestly. The argument Frum wants to make is a that Republicans have suddenly gone crazy, when formerly they were a fairly sane and moderate party that was worthy of qualified respect. But most of the colossal errors of the Bush administration didn’t originate from within any kind of proto-Tea Party movement. They were entirely the fault of very rational, highly educated Washington power brokers who consistently underestimated the cost of never-ending warfare and overestimated the ability of the economy to outgrow spending increases.

The experience of 2000-2008 is the force driving the “craziness” of Republicans, and folks like Frum need to man up and take the blame for the failure of confidence. He’s a poster-boy for the neoconservative Wunderkinds who strung along social conservatives with vague promises, while only bothering to deliver on the portions of the Bush agenda that mattered to Wall Street and the Department of Defense. He can’t turn around and say “We screwed things up last time, sure, but this time vote for non-crazy, establishmentarian Mitt and it will be totally different.” That’s no longer a credible position, and it’s not credible for reasons that reflect the failure of centrist Frummery in all its forms.

Frum becomes credible in my eyes when he starts to admit that the amount of damage done to the country by an enormously costly war in Iraq is orders of magnitude worse than any threat presented by Michelle Bachmann briefly polling over 15%, en route to renewed obscurity. (And yes, I’ll eat my words if Herman Cain somehow gets elected and immediately invades Iran to neutralize its naval threat. But that won’t happen.) The meaningful problems with the Republican party don’t chiefly involve issues where Romney and Huntsman disagree with Gingrich and Santorum. They occur on the issues where every one of them raises his hand in unison.

Rod, I don’t understand why you want to get in bed with Frum and his “businessperson’s Republicanism”. To your credit, you really do want a radical identity for the GOP that incisively challenges the status quo, but a smarter one than the one the Tea Party is capable of producing. Frum wants the usual suspects back in charge — the same ones that left us our current mess after the euphoria of the internet-stock and housing bubbles faded — while the social-con rabble are marginalized back to being a reliable pool of useful-idiot voters who can be bought for a quadrennial lollipop and a pat on the head.

Oh, and I’m getting a little tired of this emphasis on talking up long-term entitlement cuts as a way of providing ideological cover for a short-term desire for greater stimulus spending. Look, the problems with this economy aren’t going to be solved short term, and if you really think that any economy with over 6% unemployment and under 2.5% GDP growth needs to remain in a permanent trillion-dollar-deficit Keynesian mode, you’re really saying that we’re going to stay in that mode for the next decade or two, with the “cuts” being being pushed so far in the future that they don’t even belong to the current generation of leadership at all. Our economy is transitioning indefinitely to a slow-growth state (blame post-industrial globalization, or peak energy, or whatever you like) and talking about some hazy distant future when we’ll all be rich enough to want to cut Social Security isn’t a very plausible way for Frum to retain the mantle of Reagan and cover up a major shift in his personal beliefs. And we both know that if we somehow do fix the economy quickly, all that fiscally responsible interest in cuts and tax hikes is going to evaporate just as quickly as it did back when Frum was a Bush II apparatchik.

I understand if you feel the need to moderate part of all of this comment out of existence.(I know I’m sounding overheated here.) But hopefully you at least read to the end first, and understand some of my dismay at seeing you lured into an unwise “enemy of my enemy is my friend” alliance. There are plenty of ways to critique the Tea Party and its candidates without getting on Frum’s bus.

Is there something original about this screed by Frum? He’s long on rants and short on prescriptions. I detect just one:

“Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits.”

Paul Ryan did put forth a plan that made serious cuts as well as reforming Medicare. It was passed by the GOP in the House. It predictably was stopped by the Dems in the Senate. For Frum not to give the GOP credit for this is fraudulent.

I was hoping you would address this part, social conservative that you are.

” conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority.”

Frum articulates what I hear from friends and acquaintances from Europe and Asia. When I visit in Canada. What I read from writers from those areas. I think that this also is largely the perception of most non-right evangelical Americans. Yet, there is a large segment of the Christian community that seems to feel they are persecuted. You certainly seem to write from that perspective quite often. Where lies the disconnect?

Well well well, after petitioning for a National 12step program (Rod’s ping on McArdle’s Farage post) lookee here…

“I helped to make the mess.”
Frum may be the first honest – and necessarily humble – GOP commentator to go on record as contributing to the sherbenhaufen that threatens to become a sheitenhaufen for the bonfire of the vanities that was the FED-funded(time-preference warping) Neocon geopolitical cowboy comicbook adventure known as ‘spreading freedom and democracy” at the point of a gun. Trouble is he hasn’t let go of the “bottle” yet, and people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones…
Bastiat’s broken window fallacy teaches us that “shock-n-awe” destruction has a non-neglible cost, oh so very detrimental to the balance sheet, see here:http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-6168&y=-4152&z=3
For true conservative thinking, look further afield, welcome to bazaaristan!http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/28/black_market_global_economy?page=full

With our national finances running on the last fumes of off balance sheet accounting, Africa’s local and informal SystemeD (from debrouillard – off balance sheet, from brouille, fog) seems like the only logical way to go, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Yup “Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country” certainly know how that feels, but we still vote pro-life, consistently prolife, ie antiwar and the FED’s contraceptive “sterilizing” time preferences.

Thank you, Clare, for posting what I wanted to see empasized here, Frum writing I helped to make the mess.

That short phrase, so easy to miss as one reads as fast as one can to get to the “real” fun of writing a response/rebuttal, gets Frum a place at the table (in my book, anyway) and the shushing of anyone who tries to shout him down. If you (general) find his criticisms and ideas “retreads” of the words of others, maybe you should take up the banner of the ideas those words represent, instead of getting stuck on who said them first.

If Frum was running for office, I’d surely want to know from his mouth or pen if he thinks his ideas are original, and if not from whom he bases them. Until that point, I will be grateful for every idea he airs, if they serve to promote dialogue (as in conversation between two or more parties) and chastise those who would prefer to monopolize and manipulate conversation into “I speak, you listen, everyone obeys me.”

Steve “Where lies the disconnect?” its quite simple really. Private property means one thing to Frum and his fellow ‘people-like-us’ who “happily ha(s) other economic resources to fall back upon.” but means something else entirely for those proprietors who do not agree with them on how respect for property constitutes a public good:“A major new entitlement has been written into law, “ is laudable for utilitarians, and other popular intellectuals including Frum, who consider themselves beneficiaries of the injustice. But for people like me, who have contributed our private wealth to build private institutions devoted to the mission of our Redeemer’s new commandment whatever you did for the least of these, our Roman Catholic ethic is key to our understanding of any ‘private’ privilege of providing healthcare to indigents and undesirables (e.g. the 90% of Down’s syndrome foetuses aborted ) loathed by utilitarians with consciences formed by thinkers such as Frum.
There can be no entitlement worthy of the name that robs us of our pre-eminent entitlement (endowed by our Creator NOT our Government) to live out our faith “happily with other economic resources to fall back on’ absent a coercive force that expropriates the very property that forms the public good. Relegating religion to second place guts conservatism of any meaningful scale upon which to weigh the merits of the polis in the balance.

“If you (general) find his criticisms and ideas “retreads” of the words of others, maybe you should take up the banner of the ideas those words represent, instead of getting stuck on who said them first.”

I would be glad to. There’s just one problem. Frum and cohorts won’t let us wave the banner. That’s something he reserves for himself. As you say ““I speak, you listen, everyone obeys me.”

Statewide individual mandates is one thing, (and an ugly thing too, if I must pay for your immoral purchases) but a Federal commercial-enterprise mandate is a monstrosity of a wholey new order (forcing producers to produce immoral goods and forcing consumers to consume them), quite unprecedented in the history of the Republic. If Sarah Palin runs on a third party ticket, the revolving-door gravy train we call Washington DC may be in for wild ride!

@Claire: If Sarah Palin runs as a third-party candidate, she will siphon off GOP votes from the “mainstream” GOP candidate, and Obama will win. Or we’ll have another constitutional crisis as the one precipitated in 2000 by Pat Buchanan’s third-party run.

If a fourth challenger appears (Ralph Nader? Bernie Sanders?), then we could be looking at a Lincoln-esque four-way race, where the outcome is a total wild card. Palin by herself will just be a spoiler, however.

I agree, Sean. I can wax outraged with the best of them, and I won’t hesitate to aim it at my putative political cohorts quite as much as at Frum and his cohorts. In case it’s not clear so far, I am a political liberal (grudgingly, as I would want to qualify it in a much longer post).

It’s that “everyone” who, given the average eligible voter turnout of the last several decades, receive my especial ire. I don’t want to hear and see “my vote doesn’t count!” What I want to see is the voter uprising most feared by the powers that be, whether in the country club dining rooms or the living rooms of committee members (I lived under the gentle auspices of both, having grown up in a Republican-machine suburb and raising children in a Democrat-machine urban center). What I want to see in a primary election is about half of the 75-80% who never show up write in a candidate the machine doesn’t like. What I want to see is a third-party candidate win a federal election because members of both parties join independents in being fed up with the status quo.

This point of Frum’s deserves comment: “The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance?”

Ninety percent of politics is based on showing up. The reason the “extremists” (Frum’s term) rule the roost is because they nested there. What they don’t tell you in high school civics class is that parties are based on township organizations, and state organizations, and finally the national party. But it all rests on the township, or whatever the lowest level of party organization is in your state. Those who show up at the township meetings, week after week, month after month, year after year – those are the people who sooner or later get to determine how the party is run; who shows up as national convention delegates, and in many states who the electors are (for the Presidential election.)

So, Mr. Frum, it’s not a matter of voting. Parties don’t need many votes; in fact, having too many voters spoils the fun (because most voters are *not* party hacks or true believers.) Parties are organized in a hierarchical vertical structure, from the local region on upwards.

This is why the Missouri GOP wants to have a caucus this election season, not a primary. Caucuses are where the true believers love to hang out (who else can wait three hours just to get in to the township’s caucus, then hang around for 4-5 hours jockeying and negotiating for delegates?) Who does it all over again at the state level? Answer: the ones who care more than you do.

So that’s who “elects” them. Two-party politics in the USA is often a matter of “showing up.” And money, too, but money alone isn’t going to compensate for the lack of a “base” (literally and figuratively – it’s not enough to hire ACORN-type flaks to do your footwork. You really do need a devoted cadre of volunteers willing to devote months of effort to the cause.)

Mr. Evans writes: “What I want to see in a primary election is about half of the 75-80% who never show up write in a candidate the machine doesn’t like. What I want to see is a third-party candidate win a federal election because members of both parties join independents in being fed up with the status quo.”

Given the current state of ballot-access laws in all 50 provinces, and “customs” regarding access to televised Presidential debates, I hope you’re not going to hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Just another way in which the course of our Ship of State is locked in….and no one is paying any regard to that silly iceberg approaching.

Karth, I’m willing to be shown my naivete about the other 49 “provinces”, but here in PA and the municipality and county of Philadelphia, I am aware of no “ballot-access laws” that would seem to fit what you imply.

Can you be a little more specific about those laws of whose ubiquity I should be aware?

See my link to an opinion piece featuring similar musings from a policy wonk in China, advocating new field of competition: “humanitarian hegemon of the world” (up at Rod’s newer thread on the capitalism etc)

This reminds me that in 2008 David Brooks wrote “God the Republicans are sots. They think they are running against George McGovern. They are up against a hard-boiled Chicago politician.” It also reminds me of George Will’s observation, probably in 2004, that 48% of the population voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988. What does it all mean? A second term for Barack Obama. We could do a lot worse.

Si-Jenk: “This reminds me that in 2008 David Brooks wrote ‘God the Republicans are sots. They think they are running against George McGovern. They are up against a hard-boiled Chicago politician.’

Though it is indeed a pleasure, after the sovereign precedent of the little chap with the wheeled trash can and the Fuller-brush mustache at the end of Mr. Peabody’s Improbable History, to see Jenkins making his maintenance rounds in swinging round to feast on the last of the banquet crumbs well after the party has long since decamped to the orgy rooms of fresher and more lascivious threads, I must break it to him as to our now purely-imaginary readers that David Brooks did not write the words attributed to him with telling quotation marks above, or if he did he chose not to publish them and instead whispered them directly into our Maoist friend’s ears and thence to the four winds. Both Google and the NYT archive are not so much your friends as your neighbors in the next cubicle, and they watch every move you make in a Sting operation that will, if I have anything to say in the matter, will have you sleeping with one eye open more frequently with every attempted slipping such wool over the eyes of either or both of your regular readers.

“It also reminds me of George Will’s observation, probably in 2004, that 48% of the population voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988. What does it all mean? A second term for Barack Obama. We could do a lot worse.”

Then George Will can go hang, preferably bow-tied cheek by twee jowl with David Brooks over on the next scaffold, for, along with his veteran other sins against sense, his apparent penchant for pulling his facts out of his Jenkins, a touching act of home-economical humility given, one would think, his long-time ability to afford the higher-priced spreads. Dukakis in 1988 took 45.7 of the vote (as opposed to “the population”) to 53.4 for Bush, a fact that it did not take Jenkins’s imaginary George Will to reveal to a waiting world so much as Wikipedia and a hundred other sources at the fingertips of the unlazy. And shorn of the prodigies of logical leaping by the flying Wallendas trapped inside the Thimble Theatre of Jenkins’s skull, such an actual fact portends nothing unto the election a year hence, or otherwise, of the current incumbent.

For what we have just received in the way of a hearty blast of historiological Lysol on this day of humble gratitude and dead fowl, may the Lord make us truly thankful, as we bow our heads in silent thanks before all that we have been given and others have not in the way of a taste for authentic empirical meat, in hopes that they, too, will one day choose to switch to solid food, and thus earn their rightful place as eventual graduates of that card table a good foot lower than that where the grown-ups are about to sup.

There is too much in Frum’s essay to deal with every issue, so in general I will say that the problem with the GOP and the “conservative” movement is NOT that it is too conservative and unwilling to compromise (if only!). But I agree that “conservatism” does have a problem with its rhetoric and nuance. You can believe, as I do (and “mainstream conservatives do not), that the Federal government has almost no constitutional authority to regulate business or create a welfare state without becoming an economic reductionist and a capitalism cures all ills ideologue. Mainstream Republicans sometimes seem like they are intentionally trying to confirm every negative stereotype as the party of plutocrats.

Although I can’t deal with all Frum’s issue, I can’t help myself but to respond to one. Someone who thinks it is OK for the legal tender of a country to be bank notes issued by a semi-private, semi-public central bank has no business accusing anyone else of having “crank monetary theories.” I don’t care what you think about gold, the current system is face obvious absurd and indefensible. Anyone who defends it might as well tattoo “Establishment Shill” on their forehead.